I've just recently finished my third year of undergrad and I'm planning to apply to grad school this winter as a high energy theorist. White domestic maleOverall GPA: 3.628 Physics GPA: 3.757 PGRE: 970 (93%)GRE: not taken yet

I'm doing research this summer in particle experiment, hoping to get a good letter from the PI and I've been in the group for about a year, but no publications yet.My QM2 professor said he can write me a strong letter, for my third I asked one of my math professors by email yesterday and haven't heard back yet.

I'm not double majoring in math, but I'm taking extra math classes anyway. I got two really bad grades in real analysis and abstract algebra during my sophomore year (no real excuse, just hubris), then came back and aced them both in junior year. I'm planning to address that in my SOP.

For sure I'm going to apply to some top 10 programs but I don't have many ideas when it comes to match or safety schools, so can anyone help me out here?

What are you looking for in a program? What are you interested in? Less competitive schools generally have smaller departments, and as such tend to have more restrictive research coverage.

There's not really a concept of ``safety school'' when it comes to HET. There are many low-competitive schools which have a HET group, but chances are they probably don't have a lot of funding, so it's still competitive to get into HET there. In the last admissions cycle, I heard that University of Chicago only gave <10% of their acceptances to theorists. That's not just HET, that's all theory students.